While the CrowdStrike outage dominated headlines this year, telecoms service outages were among the top disruptions experienced by users in the Middle East and Africa.
This is based on insights from Ookla’s Downdetector data for the first to third quarter of this year in the region. The data showed where the pain of disconnection was felt most acutely.
Ookla reports that Telkom, MTN, Vodacom and other telecoms providers made the list of the top outages in the region.
It notes that outage patterns in the Middle East and Africa differed from those in other regions, with users reporting about as many issues with local sites and services as global ones.
The two largest outages − Microsoft 365 on 14 March and Facebook on 5 March − were part of global events. Telkom experienced the third-largest outage in the region, notes Ookla.
“Almost 55 000 users across Africa reported issues to Downdetector when Telkom experienced an outage on 13 May,” it states. “MTN, Vodacom and Du[of the United Arab Emirates] are the other telecoms providers that made our list of top outages in the Middle East and Africa during Q1-Q3 2024.”
South African mobile operator Telkom was reportedly hit by a large-scale service outage that affected its internet and phone call services. Telkom confirmed the temporary outage, with the telco gifting affected customers a 1GB data token valid for two days.
On a global scale, Ookla’s data shows users of social media sites, internet providers and gaming sites suffered the most disruptions this year.
According to Downdetector data, Facebook had the largest outage on the list. On 5 March, over 11.1 million people across the world reported issues with the popular social media site.
The second-largest global outage happened when software giant Microsoft confirmed outages that affected enterprises across the globe, including SA. This was caused by an update from CrowdStrike, which knocked affected PCs and servers offline.
CrowdStrike is widely used by many businesses worldwide for managing the security of Windows PCs and servers.
In SA, financial services firm Capitec was affected and said it experienced nationwide service disruptions.
Says Ookla: “While CrowdStrike is not a service most people think of, we saw nearly five million reports to services that rely on it (or rely on Microsoft, which relies on CrowdStrike), including emergency services, airlines and ride-sharing apps, when a routine software update went bad on 19 July.
“AT&T suffered the third-largest outage in the world, when an equipment configuration error caused customers across the entire United States to lose network access for over 12 hours.”
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